This is an awe-inspiring book. The author spent 1999 traveling around Europe looking to understand and tell its common history. What does someone from Stockholm have in common with someone from rural Poland, or the coast of Portugal? Beginning in Amsterdam at the dawn of the twentieth century, and winding up in December of 1999 in Sarajevo, Mak draws together the disparate threads of each country's history, into a broad picture of what has made Europe what it is today. I loved this massive book. It pulled together all those bits and pieces I've acquired through the years, from classes, newspapers, articles and books, and showed me where they belongs in the bigger picture.

Mak travels from place to place, centering each chapter on both a location and an event from the twentieth century. He talks to and looks at both ordinary people and those at the center of great events. He looks at how an event is both influenced by what had happened before and how it, in turn, shapes what occurs later. He looks at those obvious pivotal moments, like those fatal shots fired by Gavrilo Princip on the quayside in Sarajevo, as well as more obscure things like what happened to Jean McConville of West Belfast. The great moments are made personal by telling the story of someone caught up in it all, whether the son of a former ruler or a young mother trying to keep her family safe.

I had to read this book slowly. It is thick with connections and how the hurried decisions of a government can affect the lives of ordinary people forever. It was also an emotionally wrenching book. I'm not sure how he did it, but Mak managed to make both troop movements and strategical decisions intertwine with how that would have been experienced by an ordinary soldier or a civilian watching his house burn.

Geert Mak is Dutch, and so a little removed from the patriotic tales woven into the lives of the citizens of great powers. He was able to look at one side of a conflict then drive on a few miles and look at that conflict from the other side. He doesn't look to find bad guys or good guys, but to find out why people acted as they did, on imperfect information influenced by their own histories.

I'm a little sorry I've finally finished On Europe, but I'm looking forward to deepening my understanding of Europe's last century as well as someday rereading this book. ( )

Stylish, intelligent, thoughtful, cleverly organised, and eminently readable. In 800 pages, even though he's mostly going over very familiar ground, he never stops being interesting and engaging: the mix of travel and history works very well.

On the other hand, this is an unremittingly negative, pessimistic view of European history in the 20th century. Basically, the bad stuff gets 797 pages and the positive 3. And even there he is inclined to quibble whether they really count as positive things. It's an understandable approach: after all, we Europeans have done a lot of unspeakable things to each other in the course of the century (Mak doesn't even discuss the terrible things Europeans did to people outside Europe). In a book like this, you have to deal with war, genocide, deportation and all the rest. But I wonder if it's really necessary to deal with it to the exclusion of all else? ( )

A good if overlong book. A well delivered millenial journalist project. Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist and historian, had the idea of touring Europe in the run up to the year 2000 to review the continent's century. He has produced something that is not quite history and not quite journalism but worthwhile nevertheless. He visits cities and towns in which major elements of Europe's twentieth century history were shaped. The two world wars, the great slump of the 30's, the rise of the European Union and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European bloc are all covered. He doesn't attempt to tell us anything new but in typical journalist fashion does his best to personalise events by talking to people he meets whether old friends or new acquaintances. Interesting for me, a UK resident, to see European history through the eyes of a Dutchman and surprising to find that it is much as I had expected.

Mr Mak does well to bring history to life by focusing on the personal but at the end and again in typical journalistic fashion he is too keen to interpret today's events as the precursor to tomorrow's history. He fails to put things into the longer context by his concentration on the present.

The book was written at the turn of the century with a short epilogue in a new edition for 2006. At the time he, like a lot of people, saw only the success of the EU and the introduction of the euro. He foresaw problems in taking the European project further but he did not anticipate the financial crisis and with it the renewed potential for the old European fault lines to reappear. ( )

A man sets out to chart the world. Through the years, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the images of his own face. - Jorge Luis Borges

Dedication

Information from the Dutch Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.

Voor Mietsie

First words

When I left Amsterdam on Monday morning 4th January 1999, a storm was rampaging through the town.

Prologue: No one in the village had ever seen the sea - except for the Dutch people.

From the First World War to the waning days of the Cold War, a poignant exploration on what it means to be European at the end of the twentieth-century. Geert Mak crisscrosses Europe from Verdun to Berlin, Saint Petersburg to Srebrenica in search of evidence and witnesses of the last hundred years of Europe. Using his skills as an acclaimed journalist, Mak locates the smaller, personal stories within the epic arc of history-talking to a former ticket-taker at the gates of the Birkenau concentration camp or noting the neat rows of tiny shoes in the abandoned nursery school in the shadow of Chernobyl. His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to a half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching encounters. Sweeping in scale, but intimate in detail In Europe is a masterpiece.

Journalist Mak spent the year of 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, Saint Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica, looking to define the condition of Europe on the cusp of a new millennium. In the voices of prominent figures and unknown players, Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with details that give it a face, a taste and a smell.--From publisher description.… (more)